Wednesday, September 12

9/12

WELL, I sure hope everyone enjoyed, if that's the right word, the first annual Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance, the extended mix of Patriot Day, now rebranded to more closely reflect the solemnity and self-reflection we used to have the good sense to observe without having to wait a decade before something resembling our senses returned. Decoration. Memorial. Armistice. Let's face it: it is only the Grace of the Almighty and the Already Brimming Federal Holiday Calendar (one more day off and bankers won't have the time for due diligence) which stand between us and 9/11 Day Sales. Don't you wish now that you'd'a had the presence of mind to have invested in red, white, and blue icing stocks in those frightening times?

Twice yesterday I was informed that 9/11, the Original, was The Day That Changed Everything. That's without my trying. Both times it was someone on teevee, where the only thing that had changed in eleven years was the identity of the person who was sounding out the platitudes, lies, and vacuities. It's Apple that changed everything, you twits, and you celebrate that every fucking day, in the only way anything really means anything in this country anymore. In fact, if we'd kept Gitmo open just for everyone responsible for iTunes I'd be rethinking the staunchness of my civil libertarianism right now.

My favorite was the local who solemnly intoned about the need to educate "people who weren't even born yet". I guess that must be the horrible circumlocution of choice when "people who were unborn" sounds too political. He was accompanied by tape, sorry, video, everything's changed, of public school ninth-graders being taught their Nines and Elevens, apparently because they were more photogenic, and less hyperactive, than the eleven-year-old fifth and sixth graders who decidedly weren't even born then. Anyway, for fuck's sake, People Who Weren't Even Born Yet on 9/11 are yet People Who Can't Even Be Trusted With Boogers, so they aren't going to be taught so much as indoctrinated into a way of looking at those events that gratifies the generic teleprompter reader or wholesale American flag importer. I said to my Poor Wife, "Little fuckers don't know the first thing about World War II, either. And all the guy who just said that knows about it is that We Won! and Nazis were bad. He doesn't know any more than they do about the Reconstruction, and none of 'em knows the first thing about the Spanish Conquest, the Enlightenment, or Biology."

You probably already figured out I'd like the name returned to Patriot Day, to Honor and Remember just how fucking insane our public officials went, how easily "Patriot" "Flag" and "Freedom Fries" got tossed into the mix, without justification, and the remarkably inerrant roosting instincts of the patriotic headless chicken. "Patriot, Hyperpatriot, and Scoundrel Day, Including Remembrance, Service, Domestic Foodstuff Euphemisms, and Two Plastic Flags Flapping in the Breeze From Every Vehicle Day". Unless Arizona already has one.